n people whose experience does not confirm it. We may invite
them to act upon our assumptions, but we must not blame them if they end
by considering them to be baseless. I was talking the other day to an
ardent Roman Catholic, who described by a parable the light in which he
viewed the authority of the Church. He said that it was as if he were
half-way up a hill, prevented from looking over into a hidden valley by
the slope of the ground. On the hill-top, he said, might be supposed to
stand people in whose good faith and accuracy of vision he had complete
confidence. If they described to him what they saw in the valley beyond,
he would not dream of mistrusting them. But the analogy breaks down at
every point, because the essence of it is that every one who reached
the hill-top would inevitably see the same scene. Yet in the case of
religion, the hill-top is crowded by people, whose good faith is
equally incontestable, but whose descriptions of what lies beyond are at
hopeless variance. Moreover all alike confess that the impressions they
derive are outside the possibility of scientific or intellectual tests,
and that it is all a matter of inference depending upon a subjective
consent in the mind of the discerner to accept what is incapable of
proof. The strength of the scientific position is that the scientific
observer is in the presence of phenomena confirmed by innumerable
investigations, and that, up to a certain point, the operation of a
law has been ascertained, which no reasonable man has any excuse for
doubting. Whenever that law conflicts with religious assumptions, which
in any case cannot be proved to be more than subjective assumptions,
the unverifiable theory must go down before the verifiable. Religion may
assume, for instance, that life is an educative process; but that theory
cannot be considered proved in the presence of the fact that many
human beings close their eyes upon the world before they are capable of
exercising any moral or intellectual choice whatever.

It may prove, upon investigation, that all religious theories and all
creeds are nothing more than the desperate and pathetic attempts of
humanity, conscious of an instinctive horror of suffering, and of an
inalienable sense of their right to happiness, to provide a solution for
the appalling fact that many human beings seem created only to suffer
and to be unhappy. The mystery is a very dark one; and philosophy is
still not within reach of exp